Islamic revivalism, religious freedom and the non-Muslims in Malaysia: a preliminary discussion

The non-Muslims' responses towards the Islamization policy of the government and Islamic revivalism in Malaysia and their major organisation aims regarding non-Muslims affairs have many things in common. From the questionnaires and interviews, it is possible to summarise the responses of the non-Muslims in Malaysia. Although the Malaysian constitution guarantees the non-Muslims religious freedom and rights, what matters are the actual practices of the Malaysian government and civil servants in implementing the constitutional provisions. The non-Muslims are not convinced about their constitutional rights. Generally, their fear are based on the lack of a clear and open discussion. The non-Muslims sense of insecurity will be increased as long as their rights are denied or neglected. Attempts to Islamize Malaysia will further intensify the non-Muslim's feeling of disadvantage and they will react to fight for their rights

Towards holictic concept of leadership in Islam for sustainable development community

Leadership has been connected with power, strategic planning, administration and management, controls, communication, influence, monitoring and evaluation. Identifying an effective leader is not an easy job. With regards to Islam, the concept of leadership is discussed extensively vis a vis within the purpose of the creation of man and his role as the vicegerent of Allah. The basis of Islamic political philosophy is the belief in the unity (tawhid) and sovereignty of Allah. It is only Allah who has the right to absolute loyalty. Loyalty to a leader, chief, nation or a monarch must be subordinated to this dominant factor. It is possible to be loyal to a leader and to Allah at the same time provided that loyalty to the former does not cause the abandon of Islamic teachings. Sustainable development needs a good leadership in order to achieve its goals effectively. Yet, there are other requirements; any decision must be made through agreement as a result of muzakarah (two way discussion) among committees in the organisation [Surah al-Shura (42): 38]. Consensus of opinion, understanding and unity of opinion (wahdat al-fikr) must be constructed in problem solving and issues. The decision which would be made should be based on what shura comes out with

Event-triggered Consensus Frameworks for Multi-agent Systems

Recently, distributed multi-agent systems (MAS) have been widely studied for a variety of engineering applications, including cooperative vehicular systems, sensor networks, and electrical power grids. To solve the allocated tasks in MASs, each agent autonomously determines the appropriate actions using information available locally and received from its neighbours. Many cooperative behaviours in MAS are based on a consensus algorithm. Consensus, by definition, is to distributively agree on a parameter of interest between the agents. Depending on the application, consensus has different configurations such as leader-following, formation, synchronization in robotic arms, and state estimation in sensor networks. Consensus in MASs requires local measurements and information exchanges between the neighbouring agents. Due to the energy restriction, hardware limitation, and bandwidth constraint, strategies that reduce the amount of measurements and information exchanges between the agents are of paramount interest. Event-triggering transmission schemes are among the most recent strategies that efficiently reduce the number of transmissions. This dissertation proposes a number of event-triggered consensus (ETC) implementations which are applicable to MASs. Different performance objectives and physical constraints, such as a desired convergence rate, robustness to uncertainty in control realization, information quantization, sampled-data processing, and resilience to denial of service (DoS) attacks are included in realization of the proposed algorithms. A novel convex optimization is proposed which simultaneously designs the control and event-triggering parameters in a unified framework. The optimization governs the trade-off between the consensus convergence rate and intensity of transmissions. This co-design optimization is extended to an advanced class of event-triggered schemes, known as the dynamic event-triggering (DET), which is able to substantially reduce the amount of transmissions. In the presence of DoS attacks, the co-design optimization simultaneously computes the control and DET parameters so that the number of transmissions is reduced and a desired level of resilience to DoS is guaranteed. In addition to consensus, a formation-containment implementation is proposed, where the amount of transmissions are reduced using the DET schemes. The performance of the proposed implementations are evaluated through simulation over several MASs. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed implementations and verify their design flexibility

On the diffusion and phase transitions of confined colloid-polymer mixtures

Diffusion and phase transitions of confined neutral colloid-polymer mixtures are studied theoretically in one dimension, and theoretically and experimentally in two dimensions. For colloids in a channel, their short-time self- and collective diffusion coefficients and their long-time mobility are calculated, assuming the colloid-polymer interactions to be of depletion origin and described by the Asakura-Oosawa model. The colloid-polymer mixture is mapped onto an effective one-component system in which the size of the colloids, the hydrodynamic interactions, and the wall effects are taken into account. It is found that depletion interactions reduce the diffusion of colloids for short times and enhance their mobility for long times. For a single polymer in a colloidal suspension confined to a channel, the self-diffusion coefficient of the polymer center-of-mass is calculated in the ground-state dominance regime as function of suspension density, degree of confinement, and quality solvent quality. The scaling exponents describing the variations of the self-diffusion coefficient with the degree of polymerization and the radius of the channel are computed. These exponents are found to have higher values than those of a polymer in the absence of colloids. It is also shown that the influence of colloids on polymer diffusion under theta and good solvent conditions is much more pronounced for the latter case. Monolayers of mixtures of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and two types of particles, magnetic colloids and Cd-Se nanoparticles, are prepared using the Langmuir-Blodgett technique. Pressure-area isotherms show that the transition from the isotropic phase to the liquid-crystalline smectic-A phase, observed for pure PLA, is suppressed at a critical concentration of the magnetic colloids, whereas it persists in the presence of nanoparticles, even at high concentrations. The theory developed by McMillan for the smectic-A phase in three dimensions is extended to the case of two dimensions, and its predictions are compared to those of the latter as well as to experiment

Analysis of Power Transistor Behavioural Modeling Techniques Suitable for Narrow-band Power Amplifier Design

The design of power amplifiers within a circuit simulator requires a good non-linear model that accurately predicts the electormagnetic behaviour of the power transistor. In recent years, a certain class of large signal frequency-dependent black-box behavioural modeling techniques known as Poly-Harmonic Distortion (PHD) models has been devised to mimic the non-linear unmatched RF transistor. These models promise a good prediction of the device behaviour under multi-harmonic periodic continuous wave inputs. This thesis describes the capabilities of the PHD modeling framework and the theoretical type of behaviour that it is capable of predicting. Specifically, the PHD framework cannot necessarily predict the response of a broadband aperiodic signal. This analysis will be performed by deriving the PHD modeling framework as a simplification of the Volterra series kernel functions under the assumption that the power transistor is operating under continuous periodic multi-harmonic voltage and current signals in a stable circuit. A PHD model will be seen as a set of describing functions that predict the response of the Device Under Test (DUT) for any given non-linear periodic continuous-wave inputs that have a specific fundamental frequency. Two popular implementations of PHD models that can be found in the literature are the X-parameter and Cardiff models. Each model formulates the describing functions of the general PHD model differently. The mathematical formulation of the X-parameter and Cardiff models will be discussed in order to provide a theoretical ground for comparing their robustness. The X-parameter model will be seen as the first-order Taylor series approximation of the PHD model describing functions around a Large Signal Operating Point (LSOP) of the device under test. The Cardiff large-signal model uses Fourier series coefficient functions that vary with the magnitude of the large signal(s) as the PHD model describing functions. This thesis will provide a breakdown of the measurement procedure required for the extraction of these models, the challenges involved in the measurement, as well as the mathematical extraction of the model coe cients from measurement data. As each of these models contain have extended versions that enhance the predictive capability of the model under stronger nonlinear modes of operation, a comparison is used to represent the cost of increasing model accuracy as a function of the increasing model complexity for each model. The order of complexity of each model can manifest itself in terms of the mathematical formulation, the number of parameters required and the measurement time that is required to extract each model for a given DUT. This comparison will fairly assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of each model

Characteristics and functional properties of green banana flour: An opportunity for functional bread production

The demand for functional food products has led to an increased interest in nutrients such as minerals, vitamins, bioactive compounds, fibre and prebiotics to be present in food formulations. Amongst the prebiotics, Resistant starch (RS) has gained more attention in recent years, due to its acknowledged health benefits such as prevention and control of colon cancer, diabetes, and obesity. Banana, the world’s most favourite fruit, is one of the richest sources of RS at early stages of ripeness, when it is green (unripe). According to some estimates, more than 100 billion bananas are consumed globally each year, with an annual per capita consumption of 20 kg. Green banana pulp is a rich source of essential phytonutrients, phenolic compounds, vitamin B group, ascorbic acid and tocopherols, while the green banana peel is a rich source of minerals, bioactive compounds and dietary fibre (DF) such as pectin, cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin. Considering the nutritional value of both pulp and peel of green bananas, the production of green banana flour (GBF), which can be obtained by proper drying techniques, provides a way to preserve the nutritional benefits and increase the shelf-life of banana nutrients. White bread is the most popular bread type in the world, however, there is a growing research on fortifying bread with an array of different DF and functional compounds to take advantage of bread as a carrier of health benefiting compounds. Very few studies available that considered the effect of the GBF on technological properties, nutritional aspects and volatile fingerprint. The physicochemical and thermal properties of GBF obtained from air oven drying (ODF) at three temperatures (50, 80 and 110 °C) and freeze-drying (FDF) were compared to white wheat flour (WF). Lightness and yellowness were negatively affected by the oven temperature increment. The FDF samples exhibited higher a* and L* values and had the closest browning index to WF (P-value 0.05). While the ODF110 presented the highest pasting temperature (81.23 °C) and breakdown viscosity (7118.67 cp) amongst the GBF samples, ODF50 were the only heat-treated samples that showed similar hold, final and setback viscosity values to those found in the FDF. In terms of mineral contents, all GBF samples had higher concentrations of K, Mg, Ca and Zn compared to the WF which makes GBF as a better source of these nutrients (P-value 20% fortification level was observed. The ODF-fortified samples had higher browning index compared to control and FDF ones. The addition of both GBF types improved macro minerals (Mg, Ca, Na, K and P) without a significant change in micro minerals (Fe, Zn, and Mn). The use of FDF in bread resulted in a marked increase in both resistant and slow digestible starch content in F30 compared to ODF fortified samples at their comparable fortification levels. GC-MS-based chemical fingerprinting successfully detected more than 100 volatile compounds in the GBF fortified bread samples. Chemometrics methods used to compare the effect of GBF type in bread (FDF and ODF-fortified-bread), fortification level (10%, 20% and 30%) and bread part (crumb and crust) on the formation of volatile compounds. Furan (furfural, 2-furanmethanol), Strecker aldehydes (2- methyl butanal and 3-methylbutanal) and ketone (2-undecanone) were the most abundant volatiles in crust while alcohol (1-hexanol and 1-heptanol) and ester (ester butanoic acid ethyl) abundant in the breadcrumb. The level of fortification had a significant impact on the formation of 3-methyl-butanal (P-value < 0.05). Furthermore, bread made with freeze-dried GBF had more distinguished ‘banana-like’ flavour due to the presence of ethyl ester butanoic acid and 2-undecanone, while bread made with ODF represented more Maillard-related compounds which could signify a wood malty aroma impression. It can be concluded that fortification of bread with the GBF achieved from freeze drying had a more desirable results from technological and nutritional points of view. Although between 10% and 20% fortification level there was no clear difference, the 30% bread samples showed a high value nutritious bread with distinctive volatile flavour. Overall, the type of the drying method of GBF preparation had an impact on developing discriminant volatiles compared to bread part and fortification level

On Nonlinear Time-Invariant Behavioural Models of Power Transistors Used in the Computer-Aided Design of Power Amplifiers

The Radio Frequency (RF) Power Amplifier (PA) is the main consumer of power in a wireless transmitter. Energy efficient PA design aided with circuit simulation tools requires accurate nonlinear models of the power transistors that lie at the heart of the PAs. This thesis proposes a novel methodology for extracting and implementing power transistor behavioral models from load-pull measurements. These models provide a valuable design aid to power amplifier designers looking to simulate the nonlinear behaviour of their RF circuit designs based on nonlinear characterizations of the power transistors. Two types of power transistor behavioural models are proposed in this work. The first type is called the time-domain poly-harmonic distortion model (TD-PHD) and it targets the nonlinear multi-harmonic response of power transistors at a fixed fundamental frequency. This type of model allows the PA designer to simulate how the harmonic impedances of their designed RF matching networks effects the large signal behaviour of the PA. The TD-PHD model is shown to be able to replicate the time-domain waveforms of a power transistor under multi-harmonic source and load-pull characterization. The second model is a generalization of the first model to target a set of non-uniformly spaced fundamental frequencies and is called the time-domain multi-tone distortion model (TD-MTD). Time-domain multi-tone distortion models that are extracted from load-pull measurements spanning multiple carrier frequencies are shown to recreate the load-pull performance contours of interest to PA designers. As a demonstration of TD-MTD models, two distinct behavioural models for the main and peaking transistors of a two-way Doherty PA design are extracted from load-pull measurements and the resulting PA design is then simulated and shown to accurately reflect the measured performance of the fabricated PA as a validation of the usefulness of this modelling methodology for high power amplifier design

The role of ethics in water, food and environmental security from the perspective of farmers: case study at Lordegan in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province, Iran

The overexploitation of natural resources leads to environmental degradation and negative impacts to present and future generations. Therefore, the efficient and rational use of the natural resources is vital because their regeneration involves very costs and time. The water issue is so important that it is not just technical data that need to be addressed to solve its crisis, but also social, moral and cultural data must be used. So far, agricultural water use ethics have been discussed as a topic related to field of environmental ethics. Water ethics should be considered as an applied ethics that is based on the recognition of water as a requirement for life. Water is the major limiting factor in agricultural production. Therefore, it is important to utilize it correctly, especially in agricultural activities. In the present study, the general objective was to analyze the principles (human dignity, mutual good, solidarity, supervision, and justice) of the water ethics in the viewpoint of farmers, in the Lordegan township in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province, Iran. The present research was performed using a descriptive-analytical method, with field information through questionnaires. The research sample consisted of 219 people selected using Cochran’s formula. The results of the research indicate that the farmers have a high average age (54 years). 32.9% of the respondents are illiterate and only 14.2% had a university degree. Farmers are well acquainted with and adhered to the principles of water ethics. But even though they know that harvesting water from underground aquifers is immoral, in practice more than half of them do so, indicating that long-term water scarcity will lead to ethical disrespect. The results of the research show that in times of water crisis, including climate change, support to farmers should be strengthened, especially in economic and income terms, so that their cultural and environmental gifts are not threatened.The overexploitation of natural resources leads to environmental degradation and negative impacts to present and future generations. Therefore, the efficient and rational use of the natural resources is vital because their regeneration involves very costs and time. The water issue is so important that it is not just technical data that need to be addressed to solve its crisis, but also social, moral and cultural data must be used. So far, agricultural water use ethics have been discussed as a topic related to field of environmental ethics. Water ethics should be considered as an applied ethics that is based on the recognition of water as a requirement for life. Water is the major limiting factor in agricultural production. Therefore, it is important to utilize it correctly, especially in agricultural activities. In the present study, the general objective was to analyze the principles (human dignity, mutual good, solidarity, supervision, and justice) of the water ethics in the viewpoint of farmers, in the Lordegan township in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province, Iran. The present research was performed using a descriptive-analytical method, with field information through questionnaires. The research sample consisted of 219 people selected using Cochran’s formula. The results of the research indicate that the farmers have a high average age (54 years). 32.9% of the respondents are illiterate and only 14.2% had a university degree. Farmers are well acquainted with and adhered to the principles of water ethics. But even though they know that harvesting water from underground aquifers is immoral, in practice more than half of them do so, indicating that long-term water scarcity will lead to ethical disrespect. The results of the research show that in times of water crisis, including climate change, support to farmers should be strengthened, especially in economic and income terms, so that their cultural and environmental gifts are not threatened

Islamic Tourism: The Characteristics, Concept and Principles

The Islamic economic sector has grown rapidly in Malaysia and Islamic businesses can be found in a wide range of sectors including culinary, Islamic finance, Islamic takaful (insurance and mortgage) industries, fashion, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, and tourism industries. Islamic tourism, in particular, offers a new means of developing the tourism industry in Malaysia whilst maintaining the ethics, culture and values of Islam. Islamic tourism is not defined as a visit to the mosque alone, but the visit is closely related to nature, culture, or creativity that integrates with Islamic values. Currently, the concept of adherence to Islam (which has been called as Shariah-compliant) has gained traction across the globe. In response to this new lifestyle trend, many countries (including those such as Korea, Japan, Australia, Thailand, and New Zealand which do not have a domestic Muslim majority) are beginning to introduce tourism products related to the halal concept or Islamic orientation. The definition of Islamic tourism is still unclear and encompasses various terms such as Halal Tourism, Halal Friendly Travel Destinations, Halal Travel, Islamic Travel Destinations, and Halal Lifestyle. Even in Malaysia, a leader in this sector, the concept of Islamic tourism is still liminal. However it offers huge potential, both for the country’s tourism sector and the country’s Islamic population, contributing to the preservation and appreciation of Islamic culture in Malaysia. Islamic tourism is not only related to religious values ​​but also must be in line with every way of life that is not contrary to Islam. Not many companies and agencies organize halal tourism packages because they think it is not a necessity and a profit. Many companies are more focused on routine Islamic tourism such as Umrah and Hajj. This paper considers in detail the characteristics, concept and principles of Islamic tourism